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WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal website where Americans can request free COVID-19 tests will begin accepting orders on Wednesday as the White House looks to address nationwide shortages, but supplies will be limited to just four free tests per home. Starting on Jan. 19, the website COVIDTests.gov will provide tests at no cost, including no shipping fee, the White House announced Friday. The White House said “tests will typically ship within 7-12 days of ordering” through the U.S. Postal Service, which reports shipping times of 1-3 days for its first-class package service in the continental United States. Officials said they...

People who've received both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna coronavirus vaccines will probably need a booster shot this year, top executives for those two pharmaceutical companies said this week. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said people who've gotten both doses would likely need a third shot within 12 months and might need an annual shot thereafter.

A University of Cincinnati student died one day after receiving the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, according to health officials. John Foley, 21, passed away unexpectedly on Sunday — a day after he was administered the one-dose jab, Hamilton County Coroner Lakshmi Kode Sammarco told Fox 19. The cause of Foley’s death is under investigation by the Ohio Department of Health and the coroner’s office.Foley was found Sunday by his roommates. There is no evidence that his death is related to the Johnson & Johnson shot — which was paused in the US this week over ties to blood clots.

A Mississippi man who experienced a blood clot after receiving the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, has been left paralyzed on one side and unable to talk, his family said. Brad Malagarie, 43, of St. Martin, suffered a stroke soon after stepping out last week to get the one-dose shot, news station WLOX reported. “They called me and said he had that vaccine and something is wrong, we think it’s a stroke,” his aunt, Celeste Foster O’Keefe, told the outlet. The father of seven was rushed to the hospital, where it was determined that he had a stroke as a...

Bill Gates has said Donald Trump's decision to stop US funding of the World Health Organisation "during a world health crisis" is as "dangerous as it sounds". The Microsoft founder tweeted:"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever."

This season's colours are blue, white and bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Chicago! A town famed for what some might regard as a jumped-up quiche masquerading as pizza and home of the first skyscraper. Could there be a better venue for today's bork?We like Chicago, although we're less keen on the landing approach to the city's O'Hare airport, which left this hack feeling a tad poorly on one occasion as Boeing's finest tumbled through the turbulence.Also unwell, and snapped by a Register reader, is this example of digital signage, caught borking in the window of LOFT, a women's clothing emporium. Sadly, a jaunt...

Windows struck down at Asda Click & Collect 'Drive Thru' For the latest in The Register's sporadic series of Windows falling over in strange places, we present UK retailer Asda and its borked Click and Collect "Drive Thru" terminal.Snapped by friend of El Reg and bearded rust-botherer Andy Hinks during a misguided attempted to collect six months' worth of groceries, the glorious Blue Screen of Death was beaming its cold light over visitors to the Walmart tentacle's Hollingbury branch in the damp city of Brighton.Because Blade Runner day has now been and gone, and we still can't bark "Enhance" at...

The wrong kind of intrusion protection Symantec has acknowledged an issue with an update to its Endpoint Protection Client that causes a Windows kernel exception after users this morning came down with a mild case of Blue Screen of Death.A Reg reader who got in touch about the problem confirmed "multiple" businesses running Symantec were getting hit with the BSOD stick.According to the support note TECH256643: When run LiveUpdate, Endpoint Protection Client gets a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) indicates IDSvix86.sys/IDSvia64.sys is the cause of the exception BAD_POOL_CALLER (c2) or KERNEL_MODE_HEAP_CORRUPTION (13A). When BSOD happens, Intrusion Prevention signature version is...

...Lundgren will serve a 15-month prison sentence and will be forced to pay a $50,000 fine. Lundgren had taken to downloading free software that Microsoft offers to Windows users commonly called restore disks... Many states are actively pushing for legislation that guarantees consumers the right to repair their own gadgets, California has legislation in process to force device makers to provide users and third parties with items needed to repair devices...

Relive that sphincter-loosening Blue Screen of Death Video Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that 20 years have passed since Windows 98 memorably fell over during Bill Gates' presentation at Comdex.A nervous-looking Chris Capossela, now chief marketing officer at Microsoft, attempted to plug a scanner into a Windows 98 PC while Gates looked on. The intent was to demonstrate the plug-and-play abilities of the upcoming OS. The result was an all-too-familiar Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), and a "whoah..." from Capossela.Youtube Video"That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet," quipped Gates.As Windows 10...

Bill Gates is sorry that he made it so annoying to log in to your computer. The billionaire Microsoft co-founder admitted Wednesday that the Control-Alt-Delete function originally used to get into Windows computers is an awkward maneuver. “If I could make one small edit, I’d make that a single key,” Gates said Wednesday on a panel at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York City. It’s a confession Gates has made before. In 2013, he blamed IBM for the issue. “We could have had a single button. But the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to...

Turn your PC into a green-eyed monster Redmond has released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002 – one of the biggest updates to its cloudy operating system – ahead of the release of the Creators Update later this year. There's a whole host of upgrades and additions in the new build, but one that will be immediately noticeable to developers is the axing of the traditional Blue Screen of Death whenever the operating system throws its toys out of the playpen. Now it will be green. "In an effort to more easily distinguish Windows Insider reports vs the reports of...

A Dog's Purpose is a real movie, but the website is infected. The trailer is on YouTube, just do not go to the website.

Plugging a Kindle Paperwhite into a PC running Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update installed sparks a full system meltdown, it is claimed. Connecting the Amazon e-reader to a fully up-to-date W10 machine via USB triggers an immediate Blue Screen of Death, according to complaints on Microsoft's support forum. All the trouble started when people downloaded and installed the Anniversary Update, which arrived at the turn of the month. That's the same upgrade that has knackered millions of webcams and caused some systems to freeze up. The crash kicks off in the storage partition driver partmgr.sys, with a bugcheck code...

Windows crashing and producing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is seldom pleasant, or convenient. It's also seldom as conspicuously displayed as in the image below, which The Register found on Facebook late last week. By your correspondent's reckoning, that there is a five-storey BSOD. If you can't see the pic below, click here (it is planted in Facebook's garden, so if you'd prefer not to visit, you were warned).

Microsoft has added a QR code to its infamous Blue Screen of Death in Windows 10. As of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 14316, when the operating system falls over, you get not only the sad ASCII smiley but also a QR square that contains an encoded URL that leads you to a webpage about your problem. Scan it with a smartphone or other handheld and your browser will be taken to the embedded web addresses. Right now, it just points to windows.com/stopcode, which explains typical Blue-Screen-of-Death causes, but in future it could contain detailed information about the crash –...

The March roll-up update for Windows 10 appears to be causing headaches for users, some of whom have been left with computers that don't boot up after the patch has been applied. Microsoft issued the update on March 2 Australian time and users who installed it via Windows Update soon after started complaining of problems. Some experienced extremely long start-up times, with their devices taking over an hour to reach the user account login prompt. Others said they were forced to boot from USB thumb drives with an earlier installation version of Windows 10 and attempt startup repair. Also reported...

a South San Francisco resident received a phone call from a man fraudulently posing as a Microsoft Windows employee and asking for personal information on Wednesday, according to police. The suspect, calling himself Mike Johnson, told the resident that her computer had been compromised by a hacker and that he needed access to her computer to conduct a diagnosis. The victim did not provide any personal information to the suspect, according to police. Microsoft said that they do not contact their customers over the phone, nor do they have any records of anyone from the company calling the victim. The...

Calling the latest operating system a “failure” and Microsoft’s leaders “idiots,” a top tech website has proclaimed the PC era over. Windows is coming to a dead end, they say. PC shipments collapsed in the last quarter by almost 14 percent, analysts with IDC said last week, marking the biggest drop in sales since the firm started tracking them 19 years ago. The problem, said ZDNet’s well respected Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, isn’t the designs from the likes of HP and Dell or the size of consumer’s wallets. It’s Microsoft. “Look at the numbers: Metro-interface operating systems have already failed,” Vaughn-Nichols...

Windows 95 was arguably make or break for Microsoft, and today we celebrate the date in which it was released seventeen years ago. The iconic clouds startup screen. Seventeen years ago today Windows 95 was released to the public to major fanfare and success, this success also brought an antitrust case against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer 4.0 with a later service release of Windows 95. Windows 95 integrated Microsoft's formerly separate MS-DOS and Windows products. It featured significant improvements over its predecessor, Windows 3.1, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its relatively simplified "plug-n-play" features. There were also major changes...